Researching package product design and graphic design.

Packaging design can be seen in numerous different ways for example protecting the contents of the package, a way of promoting the product and sharing information on it's attributes and benefits and of course packaging being a part of the product itself since it is usually designed around the product.

Up until recently, packaging was mostly crafted to be appealing and designed to add value to products. However, since global warming has become much more of a serious issue, packaging has changed. If you go to a supermarket now, you can see how many product packages have been designed to be 'greener' (some packaging even has this written on it - most likely to help gain the customers approval and support). This is also quite an important factor to include when designing my packaging (though it will most likely depend on what type of product I decide to design a package for).

But when looking at packaging being visually appealing, it must have simple icons that stand out wherever the consumer is looking (except, of course, if the consumer is looking in the opposite direction). These icons are known as 'Visual Equities'. From research I have learned about several ways that must be noted about when designing packaging in order to improve the visual equities of a product. These are:

Shape - Designing the packaging to echo the shape of the product for example Ipod boxes, Headphone boxes etc.

Colour - This should also be used to be able to identify a brand. For example 'Xbox' white and green or the 'Coka-Cola' white and red. An unusual example would be crisps like Walkers since they use a variety of different colours for their packaging but the colours tie in with the flavours and this makes them all instantly recognizable, though the logo is yellow, which I assume comes from the yellow colour of crisps themselves.

Illustrations - For example the 'Nike' tick or 'Apple' logo.

Name - The use of a catchy name like 'I can't believe it's not butter'.

Of course, if a products packaging does manage to nail all of these points well, there is still the issue of product information. So if a certain packaging does manage to attract attention, the text has to be easy to read and digest. The designer also needs to consider the order of secondary information (foodstuff ingredients etc.) because getting this hierarchy right is very important for achieving user-friendly packaging.

If you look at the colours used for the background, yellow, darker yellows and brown, they do seem to be fairly similar to the cereal, which is actually pictured on the box. Of course there are other colours as well such as red and black but these have been used for the foreground text (brand logo and cereal name).

As a colour test, in Photoshop I took a selection from the cereal using the Marquee tool and pasted this into a new document. I then added a 'Mosaic' filter and enlarged the cell sizes to make the colours a lot more clear. Note that this is a method I learned in class for creating colours that almost always compliment the design of a product. This is the result:

The colours that are shown here are certainly not very different from the ones used in the background of this cereal box. Even if none are exactly the same (though they certainly appear very close), it seems highly likely that the designer took the colours from the cereal either using this method or a similar one.